Atheism Cannot Rationally Explain Morals.

Still struggling to understand the title:

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Atheism Cannot Rationally Explain Morals.

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What has atheism got to do with morality?Does your thesis work equally well asHindism Cannot Rationally Explain Morals? OrAncestor Worship Cannot Rationally Explain Morals? OrSpaghetti Cannot Rationally Explain Morals?

Our worls is self-evidently 'naturalistic' and morals self-evidently exist within it, so you leave me totally baffled.

Was there a point in posting this uttter twaddle Phat? It's just the rant of a mad priest. "Wisdom is founded on the fear of God"?????? Wtf? Have you fallen off your wagon?

It's interesting that you can produce random preachery nonsense at will. Just like the real thing. Is there an app for that?

Because he's saying insane things such as, but not limited to:"Wisdom is founded on the fear of God."

What more evidence do you need? You'd have to be out of your mind to believe that kind of nonsense.

This is the nearest you've come to understanding how moral decisions are made by real people living real lives. They make the best choices given their biological make up and socialised upbringing.Morality IS a biological process, it's an emotion like sadness or love that can be detected in the brain. Unless you're a psychopath, you are born with empathic feelings which are evolved traits that allow us to get along together. These traits are reinforced by our parent's values and society's laws. This is why morality differs by individual, society and over time. It's anything but absolute or objective and is easily shown to be so.How individuals react to difficult moral choices and what their brains are doing whilst they're considering them has been extensively studied by rabid atheists in white jackets that everybody else calls scientists. If you're genuinely interested in understanding morality as it applies in reality I suggest you start by reading the story of Fred and the Trolley Problems.EvC Forum: Biology is Destiny?
Trolley problem - Wikipedia

Just in case you didn't read to the end, the trolley problem(s) is no longer just an experimnetal thought excercise, it's become very real.

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Problems analogous to the trolley problem arise in the design of autonomous cars, in situations where the car's software is forced during an accident to choose between multiple courses of action (sometimes including options which include the death of the car's occupants), all of which may cause harm.[30][31][32][33][34] A platform called Moral Machine was created by MIT Media Lab to allow the public to express their opinions on what decisions autonomous vehicles should make in scenarios that use the trolley problem paradigm.

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That would be OUR system, the system that we actually work with, not the one you fantasise about.I note that you ignore the evidence I gave you that demonstrtaes that morality is a biological process and that everyone's morality doesn't go in different directions except when the brain's neurology gets kicked out of ballance by drugs, illness or genetics. The supernatural process that you propose would be unaffected by such 'meat-based' stuff. Morality is self-evidently confined inside individual entities and can easily be shown to be so using FMRI scans, changes to behaviour caused by drugs and illness and the study of the brains of those that lack the ability to make moral choices - psychopaths and sociopaths.No entity outside the body has ever been identified that could influence our thoughts and behaviours and if it existed and could do so, it would render us puppets. The entire laughable edifice of free will collapses. Congrats.

Take a wild guess....As far as I can establish, he has three assertionsIf something is relative - eg morality - it can't exist 'in reality' (???)
If we treat ants worse than people, we can't argue that we are moral creatures
Absolute morality is god given and infinite.Or something like that(TM)He's not making any progress on any of them - mostly because he appears to be batshit bonkers.

I was just trying to help out Dr A who's dipping in and out of here and is quite understandably feeling puzzled about what your arguments might be. Plenty of people are trying to educate you about these points so there's no need for me to butt in.You could, however, give me your thoughts on Fred and the trolley problems and the explanation that morality is just another evolved trait - a maleable brain state - which can be changed by illnesness, conditioning and drugs and is therefore neither absolute, immutable nor god given.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

I think we can all agree that. But they do, demonstrably, create feelings and behaviours that we call moral or immoral. We know this because when people are born without some of these instincts their behaviour is what we call immoral or even 'evil'. We call these people psychopaths and we can see the differences in their brains and normal brains. We also have the evidence that when brain states are changed by drugs or physical damage, moral behavious change.How can that be if morality is absolute? Sorry, that's just to crazy for me to talk to.

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You are only witnessing changes in what you percieved as normal.
  —DB

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Correct. We witness changes in brain states and behaviour compared to normal brain states and behaviours.

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a malfunctioning brain does not mean, immoral behavior, it just means a different biological process of a damaged biological function.

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Which, as we saw with Fred, led to very immoral behaviour. We saw the before and after effects twice. How do you explain this?

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The imaginations of a Socalled psychopath are no more real than yours. If they have an hallucination, is it real or not. If you said it was real you'd be the crazy one, correct?

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I can't follow this, sorry. Imaginings of what?

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I'll keep repeating this, and maybe one of you fellas will finally see it. If you want to characterize your FEELINGs or BEHAVIORS as morality, then you would be obligated show how and why, every persons thoughts or perceptions on ANY GIVEN POINT, Could all be correct or incorrect at the same time. If God did not exist, subjective morality, as you characterize it would be the height of stupidity, for any thinking person.

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I can't follow this either. If you keep repeating it and no-one understands you, perhaps there's a problem with what you're saying?

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It would mean given its components and tenets, as described by you fellas, nothing, not even what im saying, would have meaning. If everybody could have a differing opinion about something and it be valid as morality, the whole thing is idiocy. That's assuming idiocy could exist, in you fellas imaginations of morality. Wow, it ant believe you can't see that

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And again.

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You do not have a moral either way, objective or subjective. Hence, as I have clearly demonstrated, for morality to exist it has to be absolute. If it isnt, there it's nonsense

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Yes we know you've asserted this but as you've read, no-one agrees with you. We are all saying that morality is very obviously not objective or absolute. We can demonstrate how and why this is an obvious truth by showing you how it changes between cultures and between times. It also changes with brain-state.This is all demonstrably true - we can prove it quite easily and have done here.So far you've not made any coherent argument or demonstrated why something that we see change can be absolute.

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At the age of 40 his personality changes, he starts developing overt and inappropriate sexual tendancies. He starts looking at child porn. He gets kicked out by his wife for making sexual advances to young girls. He is finally prosecuted for a sex offence and put on the sex offender's register.

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He also starts getting bad headaches and when he finally turns up at a hospital, they find an enormous tumour on his prefrontal cortex. They remove the tumour and his paedophilia is cured.

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A couple of years later he starts having sexual problems again, he checks in to hospital, they find that the tumour has returned. They remove it, it cures the paedophilia. He's currently fine.

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It's his behaviour that is real and that we call immoral, his brain state changes are seen on fMRI scans. Every person DOES have a different perspective on morality. That's why we're all saying it. Over and over. It also changes between cultures and over time. We absolutely know this. You need to be specific. Were the Nazi's immoral when the created the holocaust? Yes, of course. In my subjective view - and in the vast majority of everyone else's view too. But not, it seems in Hitler's view. What's moral is what we decide as a society is moral at any point in time. It's developmental. Societies like individuals grow up and change. That's why we don't torture people anymore or keep slaves or make human sacrifices. I'm afraid you've lapsed back into obscurity again. Morality IS a biological process. It's a brain state and an emotion like anger or love. It's called empathy and it's moderated by group learning. We learn how to behave morally from our parents and from society that's why it changes over time and across societies.

There are plenty of societies today that think that sex with children is fine and many more in the past. Like we say, morality changes.But you sidestepped the point as usual. Fred's morality changed. He only developed an attraction for children - and other sexually inappropriate practices - when the tumour grew. When it was removed he lost those tendencies and when the tumour returned so did the immortal behaviour.THAT is what you have to explain. Try to stick to answering that single point. How can morality be absolute if it changes?

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Now do you see the stupidity of subjective morality.

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Subjective morality is neither stupid nor clever it just is.

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Ok I'll be more specific. If you thought he was wrong and he thought he was right who was right or wrong, actually. Or it doesn't matter, because it's all relative

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He was wrong - obviously. I take it that you don't disagree so where is the problem? Hitler almost certainly believed what he was doing was moral. Probably in something like the same way that the USA thought it was moral to drop nuclear warheads on civilian cities. It does matter and it is all relative. How do we decide which of those acts are moral or not? Well the vast majority of us think that Hitler's acts were black and white wrong while Hiroshima and Nagasaki are more nuanced moral choices.Show me the absolute - "thou shalt not kill?" Except.....

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Let's try this again. You live in your mind in a purely naturalistic universe, IOWS no God.

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If you must, yes.

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Hence, all life is basically equal.

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Nope.

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For your so called ethics to make sense,, they would need to apply across the spectrum of species.

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Nope

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So you still do have slaves

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Nope

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and you sacrifice animals to eat them, correct?

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Yup, your god made me an omnivore so I eat meat. (It's always amused me that your god made life competitive so that all of it has to eat everything else to survive - why do you think he did that?)

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Further, if it's a moral at any point in time then, it was not murder in the 40s for the Nazis, but somehow it is now

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This is unintelligible but I'll have a guess at answering the question you meant to ask. Our view of what is right and wrong changes over time. In other cultures marrying children is perfectly fine, in other times owning slaves was fine, even today barbaric practices such as FGM are seen as part of some societies culture. We believe differently here and now. We can only apply our version of morality in our culture today. It may be that in 1,000 years into the future society will look back on a lot of our practices and find them abhorrent. Think of how unequal our societies are, masses of poor and a few very wealthy. Sorry, you've reverted to gibberish again.